The above footage is what I consider to be a roughdraft of some of my ideas for this project. Is it good? No, not really. I made it for a white elephant party on a whim. I wanted to do something silly, and among ideas that ranged from impossibly ambitious given the timeframe I had to "here's a button on a screen, hehe", the idea of doing a puzzle game where the player has to communicate through abstract means stuck with me.

I've preserved it so you have an impression of generally where I want to go with this project:

• I don't like how this feels to play, if only because so much of it is spent waiting, and the puzzle itself isn't as layered or meaningful as I'd like it to be. I do, however, find what I've laid out here fascinating. If not on the basis of "everyone I talked to about this thought it was bizarre, and I took that as a form of approval", then in terms of where I could possibly go by further abstracting the concepts here in a manner better explained and explored. I will admit, as much as I like the morse code angle, I would prefer it if it were paired with a far less blunt dialog puzzle to level it out somewhat.

• I like the idea of sourcing art and sounds for any future projects I do from wherever I can find them. In this particular instance, the only thing that wasn't freely acquired in this demo—and the primary reason I had to skim through it here, and can't give it a public release—is old Canadian music from a long-defunct label. I am not Canadian, by the way, that's just a quirk of mine.

• If I were to expand this, what you're seeing would only make up a fraction of the overall project.

Right now, I am in the process of drafting the scope of this project, which is to say, what I'd like to the project to be, what I think I can do, and what I think I can't. I'm making this public earlier than I should so I have more of an incentive to work on it; I don't do entirely well under pressure, but I'm starting to find it a necessary evil if I want to get anything done.

I will update this devlog as I see fit, although, for the purpose of wanting to keep much of my desired creative direction under wraps, I will be exercising restraint in communicating certain ideas prior to release.

I hope to have some version of this project finished by the end of the year, if not the start of next.